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Together Through Life: Bob Dylan

If you're expecting some kind of metaphysical, late-life rumination on the meaning of everything, you may be misled by this album's title, and deeply disappointed.

Compassionate Dylan fans, however, will understand that this blues-anchored, Tex-Mex, R&B gumbo – the kind of love-and-heartache, pulp noir, let's-get-drunk, go-to-hell-in-a-handbasket songs you might find in a Jim Thompson novel set in a roadhouse – is very close to Dylan's heart, to his musical origins and to his self-image as a latterday Americana-music carney.

"I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver and I'm reading James Joyce ... Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice," he sings with the self-deprecating wit that characterizes this set, driven mostly by David Hidalgo's relentlessly rhythmic accordion.

That's not meant to make too much of this album, which comprises mostly groove-dominated co-writes with Jerry Garcia's old collaborator Robert Hunter and suffers from a less than lustrous mix. Dylan's production, under the pseudonym Jack Frost,sacrifices some of guitarist Mike Campbell's best licks and Donny Herron on steel and mandolin.

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But Together Through Life distinguishes itself as an unaffected, hard-boiled, back-in-the-throat chuckle at people who take themselves – and life – too seriously.

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